The Easiest Way to Brew Gallons of Iced Tea (Without a Machine)

We have talked to a lot of companies that want to make a lot of iced tea for their customers, but do not want to deal with the hassles of using a dedicated iced tea brewer. The complaints we hear are the brewers are too big, too hard to maintain and the installation process is too disruptive. Just because you don’t have an iced tea brewer doesn’t mean that you can’t make gallons of iced tea that your customers want. Before we get into how to make the iced tea, you will need a good dispenser.

First you will need a good dispenser

Just because you don’t have a brewer doesn’t mean you can’t use their dispensers. We love the 3.5-gallon slim dispenser. It holds a good amount of iced tea, is durable and due to its slim profile it takes up little space. We have customers that use a few of these and stack them side by side with different flavors of iced tea.

Second you need tea

A good quality of tea will set you apart from you competition. And even among “good quality” teas there can be a huge difference. Golden Moon Tea prides itself on using the largest tea leaves in the country, giving our iced teas a more nuanced and complex flavor. But enough with our pitch, what you need to know is how much tea to use. If you are making 3.5 gallons of iced tea, you will need 3oz of tea. You can either get this premeasured by Golden Moon Tea, by weighing it your self, or by using approximately 20 teaspoons of tea.

The third thing you need is some T-Sac’s

You could brew the tea directly in the water, but that would be a pain to clean up. The solution to this is using disposable all natural tea filters called T-Sac’s. All you do is place the loose tea into the T-Sac and it makes cleaning up super easy.

Lastly, you need water

Use a good quality water. You don’t need to go out and buy pristine glacial water that is imported from Scotland or anything like that, just be sure the water does not have any funny taste in it (like chlorine.) If so a charcoal filter (like a Britta) does wonders for the flavor of water.

Here are the instructions

Fill dispenser with cold or room temperature water

Fill T-Sac with tea

Place filled T-Sac into the dispenser

Let it sit overnight

Remove T-Sac in the morning

Serve over ice

How it works

What we are doing here is making cold brewed iced tea. Tea can brew in cold or room temperature water, but it takes a long time (about 8 hours). All you need to do is prep the iced tea before closing and by morning it will be ready to go. Now preferably it should be brewed in the refrigerator, but room temperature works just as well as long as the tea is consumed the following day.

Nice and easy, right?

This method is 100% scalable, by that I mean you can make a small pitcher or a 20 gallons at a time depending on the size of the dispenser. This method of making iced tea is so convenient; we have even had people return their dispenser so they can cold brew their iced tea. If you have questions about specific measurements, shoot me an email and I will let you know exactly how much tea to use for your dispenser.